Monday, October 3, 2016

October Horror Movie Challenge: Event Horizon (1997)

I have been wanting to rewatch this one for ages.  I saw it in the theatres and I enjoyed it but my wife considers it one of the worst movies I have ever made her sit through.

There is a lot I had forgot about.  Namely a pre-Matrix Laurence Fishburne, a pre-Gotham Sean Pertwee (son of the Third Doctor), a pre-Harry Potter Jason Issacs (Lucius Malfoy) and pre-Nip/Tuck Joely Richardson.   The movie is a good mix of sci-fi and horror with elements of Alien, 2001, Hellraiser and the Shinning and maybe just a little bit of Doom.

The "ghosts" or hallucinations or whatever are still pretty cool.  Though I kept wanting it all to be a little better than it was.  In fact we did get a better one; The Impossible Planet and Satan Pit episodes of Doctor Who.

I still think it is a good mix.  The acting is not terribly great, which is odd given who all is in this cast.  The vast majority went on to do bigger and better things.

I always thought an adventure based around a lost and then found but haunted spaceship would be great for an RPG.  I even started one for one of the versions of the Star Trek RPG after seeing this.  The premise was that the Enterprise-B had been lost and now suddenly was located several thousand light-years and about 100 years after it went missing.

There is the White Star supplement, Event Horizon, that obviously takes some cues from this movie.
I am going to have to give it a run sometime.  The book is gorgeous and I think better than the movie.



2016 Movie tally
Watched: 3
New: 2



3 comments:

  1. When Tenkar reviewed the RPG Event Horizon adventure, Venger Satanis asked in the comments whether it was influenced by this movie, and one of the co-authors responded that it was not.

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  2. To be fair, the final cut of Event Horizon was apparently shorn of the uber-grotesque body horror that the film was originally supposed to have. (I do love that some of the remaining footage of this was found in a salt mine in Transylvania, of all places.)

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  3. Tim, there is a really good one for Savage Worlds/White Star (That isn't written by me) called Heart of Darkness (http://www.rpgnow.com/product/172479/Heart-of-Darkness-White-Star) ... it takes more of its cues from "Ghost Ship" and is really awesome, I was in the playtest for the savage worlds version with Eric Lamoureux (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWd57ABQPPA)

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